Traditional travel agencies and other travel service providers are using computerized travel search tools to handle the travel requests of their customers. To be able to offer this service they are generally affiliated with a GDS or global distribution system such as AMADEUS a world-wide provider of technology solutions to the travel industry. GDS's have large or very large proprietary computer systems allowing real-time access from all over the world to airline fares, schedules and seating availabilities. They are thus offering the capability of booking reservations through all sorts of travel service providers including numerous online travel agencies (OLTA) that now offer their services directly to travelers over the Internet under the form of websites. An example of such an online travel company is Opodo at http//www.opodo.com.
Whichever service is provided traditionally by a travel agent, on behalf of its customers, or directly by end-users connecting to a travel site on the Internet, both are using in the background the travel search tools provided by the GDS supporting them. Using travel search tools and the software travel applications of the travel service providers typically requires entering an origin and a destination city, the corresponding travel dates, the number of travelers and a few other preferences. Then, exploring its databases of schedules, availabilities and fares of flights, GDS travel search tools can return what are the currently available travel opportunities that satisfy the request.
Although significant differences may exist from one travel service provider to the other (in the way their tools and travel software applications are designed and implemented, and depending on what GDS they are affiliated with) they have however all in common the chief objective of providing the cheapest possible travel solutions to their customers. Travel cost is indeed the prime discriminating factor, if not the only one, for the large majority of all business and leisure travelers.
This objective is however fulfilled by current travel search tools on the basis of a single-ticket solution, often a round-trip ticket, between an origin city A and a destination city B. One or more flight connections, e.g.: through intermediate cities C and/or D, are however often possible or required if no direct flight exists between A and B. This is indeed often the case for overseas flights or when traveling within large geographical areas like the European community or in Northern America. Experienced travelers know that in this case, i.e., when one or more flight connections are possible or required, it may become advantageous to buy two or more tickets and get, overall, a cheaper travel solution. Hence, they split their trip. With the above example a traveler may decide, for example, to book two separate round-trip tickets, one between A and C and the other one between C and B (or between A and D, and D and B). Because of the sophistication of the pricing policies in the travel industry, especially with airlines, the two round-trip flights may take advantage of the airline's pricing schemes to create a lower overall airfare. Split ticketing can involve a single carrier and multiple carriers as well.
Manual split ticketing is however essentially a matter of experience, skill and time. It takes time since each option must be tried separately from the travel search tool and carefully checked to make sure that schedules and other constraints are consistent (Is there enough time left to catch the independently booked connecting flight? Are the flights arriving and departing from the same city airport? And so on.). Exhaustively trying all combinations of carriers, intermediate cities and airports and the number of tickets to issue, i.e., the number of partitions, is not only a time-consuming job it also multiplies accordingly the number of requests thus the computing time required from the computing resources of the travel service providers and GDSs. If generalized, manual split ticketing would adversely affect their computing resources.
Indeed, the number of partitions to try is growing at an exponential rate when the number of possible flights is increasing. The number of combinations to consider is theoretically growing as what is known in mathematics as the Bell numbers which give the number of ways a set of n elements can be partitioned into nonempty subsets. For example, for a number of flights ranging from 1 to 8, the theoretical number of partitions are respectively 1, 2, 5, 15, 52, 203, 877 and 4140. Even though not all partitions need in practice to be considered (disjoint partitions can be eliminated) the number of cases that are actually to be retained is far beyond what a manual process can sustain. Neither a skilled travel agent nor an individual have in practice enough time and dedication to try them exhaustively.
The problem of the large number of partitions to consider in the general case has thus prevented travel service providers from offering a complete solution other than a very limited and straightforward application of split-ticketing. It consists in considering, on top of the single-ticket solution, the only case of a multi-ticket solution made of two one-way tickets between the origin and destination cities.
It is therefore the main object of the invention to describe an automated system that can potentially handle all cases of split-ticketing in order to broaden the ability of travel search tools to deliver low-fare travel solutions.
It is another object of the invention to allow considering all ticket partitions without significantly increasing the computing resources and elapsed time necessary to achieve it.
Further objects, features and advantages of the present invention will become apparent to the ones skilled in the art upon examination of the following description in reference to the accompanying drawings. It is intended that any additional advantages be incorporated herein.